Collabora Online in Nextcloud

Bringing Self Hosted Online Office to everybody

Collabora Online is a powerful LibreOffice-based online office suite with collaborative editing, which supports all major document, spreadsheet and presentation file formats and works in all modern browsers.

View and edit documents directly in your Nextcloud

Collabora Online supports editing your documents in real time with multiple other editors, showing high fidelity, WYSIWYG rendering and preserving the layout and formatting of your documents.

Users can insert and reply to comments and invite others without a Nextcloud account for anonymous editing of files with a public link shared folder.

Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) is free and under heavy development, adding features and improvements all the time! Enterprise users have access to the more stable, scalable Collabora Online Enterprise version through a Nextcloud support subscription.

Under your control

Most people use online services for storing their data, communication and editing documents, often giving up control over their files in exchange for the convenience of online collaboration. With Nextcloud and Collabora Online, this is no longer a trade-off.

Collabora Online is Open Source, self-hosted and secure!

For Enterprises

Enterprise users who need a more reliable and scalable solution with long term support, guaranteed response times and security updates can take advantage of our optional support contract for Collabora Online.

A valid SSL certificate for the domain that Collabora Online should run on

A valid SSL certificate for your Nextcloud

Note: This guide does NOT cover self-signed certificates. If you use a self-signed certificate then you're mostly on your own ;-)

1. Install the Collabora Online server

The following steps will download the Collabora Online docker, make sure to replace "cloud.nextcloud.com" with the host that your own Nextcloud runs on. Also make sure to escape all dots with double backslashes (\), since this string will be evaluated as a regular expression (and your bash 'eats' the first backslash.) If you want to use the docker container with more than one Nextcloud, you'll need to use 'domain=cloud\\.nextcloud\\.com\|second\\.nexcloud\\.com' instead. (All hosts are separated by \|.)

That will be enough. Once you have done that the server will listen on "localhost:9980". Now we just need to configure the locally installed Apache reverse proxy.

2. Install the Apache reverse proxy

On a recent Ubuntu or Debian this should be possible using:

apt-get install apache2

a2enmod proxy

a2enmod proxy_wstunnel

a2enmod proxy_http

a2enmod ssl

Afterward, configure one VirtualHost properly to proxy the traffic. For security reason we recommend to use a subdomain such as office.nextcloud.com instead of running on the same domain. An example config can be found below:

Troubleshooting

Some common issues:

Issue: Can't configure the URL in the Admin panel. This is most likely caused by the Documents app being enabled. Disable it and you can set the URL.

Issue: I get connection errors when trying to open documents Be sure to check the error log from docker (docker logs id-of-your-instance). If the logs note something like:No acceptable WOPI hosts found matching the target host [YOUR NEXTCLOUD DOMAIN] in config.Unauthorized WOPI host. Please try again later and report to your administrator if the issue persists. you might have started the docker container with the wrong URL. Be sure to triplecheck that you start it with the URL of your Nextcloud server, not the server where Collabora Online runs on.

Issue:Connection is not allowed errors. It is possible your firewall is blocking connections. Try to start docker after you started the firewall, it makes changes to your iptables to enable Collabora Online to function.

Issue:We are sorry, this is an unexpected connection error. Please try again. error. The Collabora Online app doesn't work at the moment, if you enable it only for certain groups. Remove the group filter in the App section.

Issue: Collabora Online doesn't handle my 100 users. This docker image is designed for home usage with a limited numbers of users and open documents. If you need a more scalable solution, consider a support subscription for a reliable, business-ready online office experience.

Issue: Collabora Online doesn't work with Encryption. Yes, this is currently unsupported.